The tears came fresh to her eyelids as she thought of that last day. She had gone out, and when she was half-way to the village she found that she had left her purse and she turned back. Then, when she was close among the bushes in the front of the house, she had heard the sound. She had heard it, but she didn’t know what it was. There was a crash and a fall. She had to describe them over and over again, and she couldn’t get nearer than that. But when she came round the house, there was Aunt Letty fallen down by the back door with a terrible wound in her head. She wasn’t quite dead, but she died before the doctor came, and she died without recovering consciousness.

Anne lay there and remembered. There was no clue-nothing at all. Someone had killed Aunt Letty. Someone had struck her a smashing blow and made off through the woods. There was nothing to say who it was.

The house was left to Anne. Nobody wanted to take it, because of the murder. Everyone said that Anne couldn’t stay there. She didn’t want to stay there. She wanted to go away as far as possible and never see the place again. At least she thought that that was what she wanted. She went away.

She went right away, round the world with her friend Mavis Enderby. It was curious that all the time of being away seemed so dim. They had gone round the world and turned to come home through America. Try as she would, she couldn’t remember all that as she remembered the little bits and pieces of her childhood. And then Mavis had fallen in love with a chance-met stranger and had married him-just like that. And Anne had said she couldn’t think how anyone could do such a thing, but it was all right for Mavis if she wanted to. She didn’t know how she could, but it was her life, and she had nothing against Bill, who was nice but no different from hundreds of other men whom they had met.

What makes you fall in love with one and not with another? What had made her fall in love with Jim and he with her? They had both met dozens of other people. There was everything to stop them, and yet they had both gone down drowning deep.

She sat up and looked around the room. It was her own room. In the early morning light it had a shabby, familiar look. She got out of bed and went to the window. The trees had grown. They had not been cut or pruned, and they crowded upon one another. Her room looked to the back of the house. There used to be a gap between the two end cherry trees, and you could see right down the hill to Swan Eaton. Now there was no gap. The trees closed it in. You couldn’t see the village, or any habitation.

For the first time since she had awakened Anne began to feel afraid. She didn’t know what she was afraid of, but fear came silting over her and she drew back from the window as if the fear were outside in the garden among the trees.

But that was nonsense. Nonsense or not, she went right back from the window until she touched the bed and sat down on it, shaking a little. She was remembering-that was why she was afraid. She had landed from the States and gone to London. She hadn’t written to say she was coming. That is to say, she hadn’t given any exact date. She had been away for nearly three years, and she had waited to see Mavis married, and then she had come. There wasn’t anyone very near-some cousins whom she had never seen much of. She remembered arriving in London on a dark rainy evening. She remembered going to an hotel. And she couldn’t remember anything more than that. It seemed very far away and vague, but she did remember getting to the hotel in the evening and being very tired. And after that nothing-nothing at all until she was standing half-way down those cellar steps and knowing that there was a girl’s dead body at their foot. She didn’t strain to remember. Perhaps it would come back. It was no good straining. There was a gap in her mind. She couldn’t fill it up by trying, but at least she knew who she was now.

There was a clock on the mantelpiece. She looked up for it as if she expected it to be there. Someone must have wound it. It said half-past six. She tried the door and found it locked. Her clothes were here, and there was water in the jug on the washstand. She washed, dressed, and felt more ready to face things.

There were the two men here-her cousin Ross Cranston and the other man whose name she didn’t know. She wasn’t really afraid of Ross. He had come and gone, always rather unsatisfactory and a trouble to Aunt Letty, but she had never thought of him as someone to be afraid of. It was the other man who made her feel as if a cold finger touched her spine. She didn’t know his name. She only knew that he was evil, and that she stood in his way. What happens to you when you stand in the way of an evil person?

She made herself look at the answer to that.

Anne went on remembering. It was here a little and there a little. Then, suddenly, something that made sense of a lot of things. She sat in her bedroom, and in her mind she went round the house. Every time she did this she remembered something fresh. You couldn’t push your memories, they just came. And they came in the funniest way. It was when she was going up the attic stair in her mind that she remembered why she had gone to the London hotel, and its name, the Hood.

Aunt Letty had always stayed there. It was the sort of hotel where ladies like Aunt Letty stay-very dignified, rather expensive, thoroughly respectable. It had not the faintest connection with the attics, and why she should remember it when she was thinking about going up the attic stair in this house she couldn’t imagine.

She put the hotel away and went on picking her way round the house. She had been going up the attic stair-she would go on. The stair was very steep. She could remember Aunt Letty telling her to be careful as she came and went. She even remembered what she had said… No, that wasn’t Aunt Letty-that was Grammy. How curious to have no consciousness at all of someone, and then to have her back as if she had never been away. Dear, dear Grammy, who was the cook until the second year of the war, when she left to take charge of her sister’s children when her sister had been killed by a bomb. Grammy had always said, ‘Now you mind your feet, my dear. Don’t you look at them and don’t you hurry them, and you won’t fall.’

The attic was large and dark. Anne always thought it was like a hospital, because there were broken things everywhere-a screen with a hole in the panel, a chair with a broken leg, a picture with a broken frame. She remembered so many broken things. How strange that she could remember these things which had never mattered very much-remember them quite accurately and distinctly as she sat on the side of her bed in a locked room on the floor below-things that she hadn’t seen or thought of for three years. And yet she couldn’t remember what had happened so short a time ago.

The attic-it was curious how she came back to it. Perhaps it was an association of ideas. She would have to think that out. Everything in the attic was mixed up, nothing was in order. That was how her mind was-old things, new things. Not so many of those. Things that had had their value and lost it, things that had never had any value at all. In her mind’s eye she stood in the doorway of the attic and looked into its dimly lighted depths. There seemed to be no end to the things that were in it, as there was no end to the things that were in her mind-things half forgotten, things half remembered, things that showed vaguely and were half glimpsed and then wholly lost again. Time went by.

The house began to stir. Someone came along the passage. The key turned in the lock. Anne sat quite still. The handle turned, and the door opened a very little way. Ross’s voice said her name.

‘Anne-’